I'

,

II

III I '

I I

III 1'1

I

I' !

I 1,1 ,

, I, I I

364 IAN WAIT

herent properties, and they have a structural, rather than a merely

illustrative, function. The analogy is equally close as regards subject matter. Heart of

Darkness shares many of the characteristic preoccupations and themes of the French Symbolists: the spiritual voyage of discovery, especially through an exotic jungle landscape, which was a com­mon symbolist theme, in Baudelaire's "Le Voyage" and Rimbaud's "Bateau ivre/' for instancej the pervasive atmosphere of dream, nightmare, and hallucination, again typical of Rimhaud; and the very subject of Kurtz also recalls, not only Rimbaud's own spectac­ular career, but the typical symbolist fondness for the lawless, the depraved, and the extreme modes of experience. ,

More generally, we surely sense in Heart of Darkness Conrad's supreme effort to reveal, in Baudelaire's phrase about Delacroix, "the infinite in the finite."4 This intention is suggested in Conrad's title, The Symbolist poets often used titles which suggested a much larger and more mysterious range of implication than their work's overt subject apparently justified-one thinks of the expanding ef­fect of T, S, Eliot's The Waste Land, for example, or of The Sacred Wood. This centrifugal suggestion was sometimes produced by an obtrusive semantic gap-a coupling of incongruous words or im­ages that forced us to look beyond our habitual expectations; there is, for instance, the initial puzzling shock of the titles of two of the great precursive works of symbolism which appeared in 1873, Rim­baud's Une Saison en en fer, and Tristan Corbiere's "Les Amours

jaunes."5 Compared with the particularity of Conrad's earlier and more

traditional titles, such as Almayer's Folly or The Nigger of the "Nar­cissus", Heart of Darkness strikes a very special note; we are some­how impelled to see the title as much more than a combination of two stock metaphors for referring to "the centre of the Dark Conti­nent" and ((a diabolically evil person." Both of Conrad's nouns are densely charged with physical and moral suggestions; freed from the restrictions of the article, they combine to generate a sense of puzzlement which prepares us for something beyond our usual ex­pectation: if the words do not name what we know, they must be asking us to know what has, as yet, no name. The more concrete of the two terms, "heart," is attributed a strategic centrality within a formless and infinite abstraction, "darlmess"; the combination de­fies both visualisation and logic: How can something inorganic like darkness have an organic centre of life and feeling? How can a ' shapeless absence of light compact itself into a shaped and pulsing

4. Oeuvres completes, ed. Ruff (Paris, 1968), p. 404. 5. A Season i.n Hell and "The Yellow Loves" (both French). [Editor]

HEART OF DARKNESS AND RACISM 365

presence? And what are we to make of a " d" , b ' f goo entIty I'k ecommg, 0 all things, a controlling part of a "bad" I ~ a heart

ness? Heart of DaTkness was a fateful event in th h' one lIke dark­and t.o announce it Conrad hit upon as hauntin e thlstory of fictionj struslve, an oxymoron as Baudelaire h d f g, o~gh not as ob­du Mal,6 a or poetry WIth Les Fleurs

• • •

HUNT HAWKINS

Heart of Darkness and Racismt

In 1975 in a speech at the Uni ' f Image of Africa" Ch' A h bvemty 0 Massachusetts titled "An

. " ,mua c e e declared Conrad H

raCIst. He has repeated this ch' " was a bloody S 1 arge m an artIcle m the T L ary upp ement in 1980, a lecture in London' 19 tmes iter­the University of Texas in 1998 d . . m 90, a speech at . . ' an m passmg reference . I IDte~e:vs. The original speech was ublished ism severa RemetV m 1977 and in a revised ~ . 19 n The Massachusetts tion of essays Hopes and Imped' vertslOn m II h

88 in Achebe's collec-

tmensaswe t eth' d d" Norton Heart of Darkness Since th 't h bITe IlIon of the , f' . en I as een reprinted times, 0 ten m conjunction with C d' many novel Things Fall Apart is also now f~~ra s lnovella. Ac.hebe's own

Heart of Darkness. The controversy sti!~~n~; ~~~:~:'gI~ed lnext. to gone on for three decades and shows no signs of a~ /c ~at~on

a standard topic for school assi nments d a mg. t as impression that racism is the main orgeven th ann! ~as fostfe~ed

pOItarlce' C d' k ' e 0 y, Issue 0 Iffi-studi:~ wh~~r~e sd:vort' Ironically

h, it has given new life to Con-

" n mg 0 narrow tern. An Image of Afric "A h b h ld a,. c e e comes close to saying that Heart

(,s ou cease bemg taught. Mter noting that it has been

'''aluateads permanent literature-read and taught and I .• , by seriou d·" h constant y "TSonalizes ~ aca femhlcs, e asks whether a novel "which de-..... a portion? t e human race, can be called a eat

of art. My answer IS: No, it cannot" Finallv he ob' t gr IItod h . J' Jec s agamst ay p~r aps the most commonly prescribed novel in

WellIA:ielhh"bcelou;ri literature courses." In his later interviews how-

200~ ~ e 'd b clear he isn't calling for censorship. For e~ample e sal a out Heart of Darkness, "I am not Ayatollah Kho-

Th.e .flowers of evil (French). [Editor] Ongmal version published "Th I 14.3 (1982): 163-71; u da~;d and :x~ue ~f RaCIS~ in Heart of Darkness," Conradiana Norton Critical Edition PRe rinted b ensl~elJ.' reVIsed by the author especia:Jly for this

, are the author's. . p y penOlSSlOn of Texas Tech University Press. Notes

366 HUNT HAWKINS

b . books but they should be read · d 'bl'vein annmg , meinl. I on t e Ie b d I t h it "I Indeed

fr t' the novel anne, eac. , carefully. Far om wan Inhg t' that readers are passive re~

h' eds on t e assump IOn . , censors Ip proce d h' h uld stimulate active, cntIcal ceptacles whereas goo teac ~nDg s k

O ess such reading is especially

d· I the case of Heart DJ ar n . rea mg. n .. h a dense complex text. On many tOPICS, important beca~se It IS s~c h t ar'e multiple, ambiguous, ambiva~ including race, It offers ~ews t a ultimately incoherent. lent, confli~ting: an~ per ~ps :"::h of Heart of Darkness dehuman~

Achebe IS qUIte rIght t at M I w often uses frankly deroga~ Afrj Conrad's narrator, ar 0 , h h

izes cans.. .' them At various points in t e story e tory language III descnbIll~, (I' • )) and ((rudimentary souls." He

f th as "savages mggers, b h . re ers to em '. t their appearance or e aVlOr: applies the following ~~jeci t~;~~fi °d' h" and "satanic." Achebe's i< )) "horrid" ug y en IS , h h grotesque, , , "t ems with Africans w ose u-

1980 article notes that the stbory eall

dermined by the mind-· . d 'tted in theory ut tot y un .

mamty IS a ~I d the retty explicit animal Imagery lessness of Its contexlt ~n I' 'tP nimal comparisons are with

d' 't"2 Marows explCi a , f surroun mg 1 . d b Thus the image Conrad projects 0 ants, hyenas, horses, an _ ees. . African life can hardly be called flattenng.

* • * . h b observes that Africans are barely pres-

In a related pomt, Ac e e C d' stOl"V none of the African · H rt if Darkness In onra s ~ j)

ent m ea 0 vVtth the exception of Kurtz's mistress_: no characters has a name. h We do not go mto African appears for more than a futhll P~:~~~~n 'from their point of h . d f ny Africans to see e SI f 'd

t e mm s 0 alb' limited to a total of our pi _ view. In fact, they barely sPbea <., 'demthg t Conrad failed to portray

, It might e sal a I gm sentences. little of their culture, having spent ess Africans because he knew tl in the company of white h . ths in the Congo, mos Y I

t an SIX m~n I d f African language. In his nove s men, and WIthout know e ge 0 any . s he does give in-

t in the Far East where he spent some SIX ye~r , h " se , II' h' 1896 story set m t e dividual portraits. Sti ,Ill IS ki .

f p )) Conrad does have spea ng, Outpost 0 rogr~ss, d of such characters in , And he imaginatIvel~ crea~es ~zer:s here he spent less than tromo, his novel set III ~atm d e~lCa w d neglect of Africans '

k So his comparatIVe re uction an wee . h b en deliberate. Heart of Darkness r:n~st a:r; he t his Things Fall Apart as a

Achebe has exphcltl~ SaIh e WIO e b t it also answers Heart

I t Joyce Cary's Mtster Jo nson, u f lb' P Y 0 A h b ) 1 about the British takeover a an o. Darkness. c e e s nove . lage at the end of the nineteenth century gIVes a "

h P fil f Chinua Achebe, . M J '''Stonlteller of the Savanna: ro e 0 1. Quoted In aYd aggl, '}-

Guardian (18 November 20~,O).. L't Supplement 1 February 1980, 113. 2. ChinuaAchebe, "Viewpoint, Tunes ~ erary ,

HEART OF DARKNESS AND RACISM 367

carefully balanced picture of an African culture. Moreover, it pro­vides a context for, if it does not exactly condone, some practices that Conrad presents as savage and disturbing. The human sacri­fice of Ikemefuna is dictated by the Oracle. And Okonkwo has brought home five human heads from war, drinking from one on great occasions. For many years Conrad's Heart of Darkness may well have been the only book set in Africa that students were as­signed. Thus it is important that they read Things Fall Apart and other works to get a fuller, more accurate portrayal.

It would be a mistake, nonetheless, to read Achebe, any more than Conrad, as representing all of the cultures and situations on the continent. Achebe's Ibo live at approximately the same time but more than a thousand miles from the upper Congo depicted by Conrad. Therefore, it would be wrong simply to see Things Fall Apart as the truth concealed behind Heart of Darkness, When Con­rad visited the upper Congo in 1890, it had been devastated by both Belgian exploitation and thirteen years of Arab slaving run by Tippo rib, a coastal trader whom Henry M. Stanley had transported to Stanley Falls (Conrad's ((Inner Station"). Thus the tribes of the region-specifically, the Bangala, the Balolo, the Wangata, the Ngombe, the Bapoto, and the Babango-were a great deal more dis­ordered and violent than tribes in other parts of Africa. When George Washington Williams visited in the same year as Conrad, he was appalled by the Belgians and became the first total opponent of King Leopold's regime. But at the same time he was shocked by the Africans. In an open letter of protest to Leopold, Williams re­

that ((Cruelties of the most astounding character are prac­by the natives, such as burying the slaves alive in the grave of

dead chief." He also said, "Between 800 and 1,000 slaves are sold be eaten by the natives of the Congo State annually.)J Thus, al­

Williams denounced the cruelty of Leopold's soldiers, one complaints against the regime was, ironically, that it was "de­in the moral, military, and financial strength necessary to "3

is uncertain to what extent Conrad may have witnessed any practices. He made no mention of them in his Congo diaries,

he did later tell Arthur Symons, "I sawall those sacrilegious "4 Unlike most other Europeans, however, Conrad did not such rites, even conceived at their worst, as a justification for

subjugation. In a protest letter sent to Roger Casement in

Washington Williams, "An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II," in I,h" U", Franklin, George Washil1gton Williams: A Biography (Chicago: U of Chicago

248 [see thc selection in this Norton Critical Edition]. "A Set of Six" in A Conrad Memorial Library· The Collection of George

City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), p, 170,

368 HUNT HAWKINS

1903 as a contribution to the fledgling Congo refonn movement) Conrad declared,

Barbarism per se is no crime deserving of a heavy visitation; and the Belgians are worse than the seven plagues of Egypt in~ somuch that in that case it was punishment sent for a definite transgression; but in this the Upato man is not aware of any transgression, and therefore can see no end to the infliction. It must appear to him very awful and mysterious; and I confess that it appears so to me too. 5

Conrad became a staunch, if complicated, opponent of European expansion. Heart of Darkness offers a powerful indictment of impe­rialism, hoth explicitly for the case of King Leopold and implicitly (despite Marlow's comments on the patches of red) for all other European powers. As Marlow says, HAll Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz." He declares, 'The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing." His story graphically demonstrates how ugly it could get.

In his 1975 speech Achebe did not mention Conrad's anti­imperialism, but in his 1988 revised version, he concluded, "Con­rad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation." Conrad criticized imperialism on many grounds, one being the hypocrisy of the "civilizing mission." In liThe White Man's Burden," published in 1899, the same year as Heart of Darkness, Rudyard Kipling posited that colonizers selflessly and thanklessly better the lives of their "new-caught, sullen peoples,/Half devil and half child," coax­ing them from the bondage of their "loved Egyptian night." The trope here is temporal, conceiving Europeans (and the Americans Kipling was encouraging to take over the Philippines) as adults advanced while non-Europeans were children and primitive. This trope, which provided the chief ideological support for late teenth-century imperialism, derived largely from Charles n"rwin', theory of evolution. Darwin did not take up the question of tion of human societies in his Origin of Species in 1859, but in Descent of Man in 1871, he concluded, ({There can hardly be doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astortisl'ID<'" which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at rushed into my mind-such were our ancestors."6 The co-found. of evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, was more explicit.

5. The Collected LetteT~; of Joseph Conrad, eds. Fredenck Karl and Laurence Dayjes bridge: Cambridge UP, 1988),3:96.

6. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York. pleton, 1896), 618.

HEART OF DARKNE{;JS AND n . , .llACISM

h· . I " h 369 IS artIe e T e Origin of H R

published in 1864 W. 11 uman aces and the Antiquity of M " . I ,a ace argues that 0 . h an

surVlva and natural selection I!the b wmg .to t e struggle for aUf race would therefore iner' ~tter and hIgher specimens of would give way and successlealsed~n spread, the lower and brutal

f ve y Ie out and th .

ment 0 mental organization ld ' at rapId advance_ lowest races of man so far h

WOU h ochcur, which has raised the very

. h a ave t e rutes d . WIt scarcely perceptible m difi' ... an ,m conjunction

d f I . 0 catIOns of fo h d

won er u mtellect of th G . rm, as eveloped the . h e ermamc races"7 B th d

nmeteent century this view f h . Y e en of the had become firmly entrenche: uman social and racial evolution

. There is no doubt that Conr'ad . tionary trope in Hearl 0.( D k mcorporated the temporal evolu~

• I :J ar ness. Marlow d 'b d h· . upnver as 'traveling back to the earl' . es~n e IS Journey and the Africans as'.:"the h' . lest begmmngs of the world"

h. pre Istonc man" B t h h

t IS trope to support imp . I· C . u rat er t an using ena Ism onrad . d site. First of all, he points out th ' E uses It to 0 the oppo-own ideals as civilizers In I tt at ur~peans don't live up to their

. a e er to hI hI· h wood, Conrad said of his p. "Th s p~ IS er, William Black~

d I roJect, e cnminal'ty f· ffi an pure se fishness when tacklin th .... lOme ciency justifiable idea."8 In the st h g e cl\'lhzmg work in Africa is a When Marlow's aunt app~ryud e. sugg~stli~ the)deals are mere sham.

II s Impena sm for II . h

mi ions from their horrid wa s J! " weanmg t ose ig-Company was run for profit" ThY' hIe I ventured to hint that

h . e on y 'impro d .

see, suc as the firem . ve speCImens" 'oxplc)it'LticlTI an, are parodIes. Oth' . ,~ and violence. Conrad I I erwlse, we Just see

f Every c ear y expr h· o uropean cruelty. esses IS con~

ship firing blindly into :~ such ~emorable scenes as the assumed to have started :h co~tment, the beating of the

carriers found dead i here at the Central Station n arness on the c I '

a bullet-hole in his for h d aravan trai, the man Ipil:grilns" sho f fr e. ea as a part of road "upkeep" th

o mg am theIr steamer the c .' e chain-gang bUilding th '1' rew not bemg given

Imlluishiing in the "g f d ehral way; and the contract-laborers rove 0 eat "

addition to pointing out th h . . . !Icivilizing mission" e ypocnsy WIth whIch the ideals of

h were espoused ConI' d h

t e validity of those ideals th~ a may ave ques-report, written while Kurtz was Sti~:elves .. Marlow says of

Th . n emIssary of progress e opemng paragraph h . h '

tion, strikes me now as' 0:vever, In t e light of later informa~ th ommous He beg . h h

at We whites, from th . f d an Wit t e argument e pomt 0 evelopment we had arrived

Wallace, "The Origin of Human Races d h " . of Natural Selection' "Journal if ~t ~ e AntiqUIty of Man Deduced

. , ' 0 nt Topological Society of London Conrad,2:139_40.

370 HUNT HAWKINS

at, "must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings-we approach them -with the might as of a deity .... By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded."

The ideals themselves carried a hubristic arrogance. Edward Said, and before him Wilson Harris, have observed that Conrad's very style with its first~person narrators, framed narratives, time jumps, fractured sentences, and addiction to adjectives upsets the notion of absolute truths assumed by the ((civilizing mission."9 Both fault Conrad, probably correctly, for not shovving non~European resist­ance and not imagining an alternative to imperialism, but both ap­plaud him for attacking European domination. Conrad likely didn't show more of the Africans because he wanted to focus on the Eu~ ropeans. As Abdul JanMohamed notes, iiDespite what writers like Chinua Achebe say about the denigration of Africans in Heart of Darkness, Africans are an incidental part, and not the main objects of representation, in the novena." l

Conrad also used the trope of evolution in Heart of Darkness to attack imperialism by suggesting that Europeans in colonies could slide backwards on the evolutionary scale. Kurtz is the main exam~ pIe. In Africa the wilderness whispers to Kurtz ((things about him­self that he did not know." His "forgotten and brutal instincts" are awakened. And he passes beyond '(the bounds of permitted aspira~ tions," indulging his greed and lust, placing the heads of iirebels" on posts around his house, presiding at "midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites" (probably human sacrifices), and commit­ting the hubris of setting himself up as a god, Marlow himself feels the temptation to go ashore for iia howl and a dance" though he re~ sists it. And while no match for Kurtz, the other Europeans have become animalistic. The uncle of the manager has a ((short flipper of an arm" and the members of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition are "less valuable animals" than their donkeys.

Conrad's effective use of the evolutionary trope against imperial­ism, however, can still be described as racist since it continues to assume Africans are at the low end of the scale. Thus Achebe fin­ishes his sentence, iiConrad saw and condemned the evil of imperi­alist exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth." Similarly, Patrick Brantlinger observes, «Heart of Darkness offers a powerful critique of at least some mani-

9 See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York Knopf, 1993), and Wilson Harris, "The Frontier on Which Heart of Darkness Stands," Research in African Literatures, 12:1 (Spring 1981), 86-93.

I. Abdul JanMohamed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial D~' ference in Colonialist Literature" in Race, Writing, and Difference, ed, Henry LowS Gates Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986), p, 90,

HEART OF DARKNESS AND RACISM 371

festations of imperialism d' , h

. . an raCIsm as It si It I t at cntIque in ways that b h mu aneous y presents

d can e c aracte' d I

an racist."2 In a number f nze on y as imperialist get beyond the evolutiona; tassaged however, Conrad reaches to tainly and ambiguously, rope an racism, though often uncer~

Fran~es B, Singh has argued that Co d' . and theIr evil is what has co t d K nra Viewed Afncans as evil

D k" . rrup e urtz She ' ,

ar ness carries suggestio th h ' ' mamtams Heart of is to be associated with Afr,ns atht e evIl which the title refers to

h lcans t eir custom d h '

t at Conrad would have us b I" Af' s, an t elr rites" and

h h· e leve ncans ((have th

t e w Ite man's heart black "3 F h e power to tum makes clear that Kurtz's c' o,r t e most part, however, Conrad

fr E orruptlOn comes not f Afr'

o~ urope and from Kurtz himself. K rom lcans but stramts provided in Euro e b . uru no longer has the rep Since he is Ilhollow at t~ coy p~hlcemkien and gossiping neighbors.

'b re, ac ng intern I . susceptl Ie to the whisper f th 'Id a restramts, he is

M I 0 e WI erness The d I 'Id as ar ow realizes by the end f th . ' . at( W1 erness, lurking in the streets of Bru 1

0 dehstory, IS not Just in Africa but

d sse s an overing h Th

dee , it is cosmic as shown in a ,over t e ames, In ~ Earth suddenly seemed shru k t senhten,ce m the manuscript: ({The h f . n ot eSlzeofape .. ,

eart 0 an Immense darkness." It is K" a spmnmg III the lake tribe rather than the oth urtz who has corrupted his does suggest the Africans w e~.waYdaro~nd, At one point Conrad He says Kurtz took a seat I' ors lppe

h evIl prior to this corruption

amongst t d 'I f h ' only time Conrad appll'es th d '( e eVl sot e land." But the

e wor satan'" t Afri nection with their chanting K 'b IC 0 cans is in con~ I I as urtz IS eing take C arge y resis ts the lead of Ki I' h n away. onrad

devil" H t k . P 109, W 0 called non~ Europeans 'Ih If , e a es care to dIstinguish b t h a ~

what the Africans do and h'I h fie ween w at Kurtz does and mer, he finds little ~th th: ~ ~t e ~d,s great fault with the for­when he wrote: ilBa b' a e~, lO his letter to Casement

D k r ansm per se IS no crime J! Cd'

ar ness exonerates the Africans b h' ,onra lO Heart of seemed at one bound to h b y aVlng Marlow say of Kurtz iiI

ave een transported . t I' region of subtle horrors wh lO 0 some ightless

I' , ,ere pure, uncomplicated

a,us.lv __ inre Ief, being something that had . h sava~ery was a

the sunshine," a ng t to eXlst-obvi~

Still, while resisting the comma Conrad continues t n conte~porary demonization of

and "barbarian" H 0 pl~ce them m the category of ((sav-text where he pr'aise: t1:

eAfris sl.lghtlYffurthhe.r in several places in

, K ' cans or t elI ener 'tal' d urtz s mistress is liSUp b ' gy, VI lty, an

er '" magmficent ... stately." The

Patrick Brantlinger R l if D 1m

P(Ithaca' Cornell UP, 1~8~)op, ;~7 ess,' British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914

ranees Singh "Th C I' J, ' 44, ,e 0 oniallst Bias of Heart of Darknes~'" Co d' 10 ( , nra tana 1978): 43,

I

I

I

I

,I

372 HUNT HAWKINS

black paddlers off the coast have "a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement." And Conrad has Marlow commend the cannibals in his crew as i'fine fellows ... men one could work with." Moreover, the cannibals possess a mysterious inner restraint in not eating the whites on board even though they are starving. Thus, in a novel that is a relentless, skeptical inquiry into the basis of moral behav­ior, one that questions morality founded on principles or provi­dence, the cannibals with their f'inborn strength" provide one of the few signs of hope. All of these examples, however, are under­cut by phrases that continue to associate Africans with the un­civilized. The mistress mirrors the wilderness. The paddlers are «natural." The honor of the cannibals is ((primitive." Nonetheless, Conrad does accord them a certain respect. In contrast -with the hypocrisies of Europe, they are "true" and «wanted no excuse for being there."

Conrad goes even further in a number of passages where he has Marlow recognize, or almost recognize, or struggle to recognize the humanity of the Africans. Unlike Kurtz, Marlow resists the tempta­tion to exploit Africans. Instead he does what little he can to help by giving his biscuit to the man in the "grove of death" and by pulling his whistle so' the "pilgrims" cannot slaughter Kurtz's fol­lowers. As a result of his experience, Marlow seems to overcome his prejudices enough to acknowledge the IIclaim of distant kinship') put upon him by his helmsman through their shared work and shared mortality. Getting to Kurtz, he says, was not worth the loss of this life. Marlow urges his audience to recognize IItheir human­ity-like yours." But these examples are also ambiguous. Marlow can't say whether the person he hands the biscuit is a man or boy because II-with them it's hard to tell." The sentence after IItheir hu­manity-like yours" consists of a single word: CiUgly." And Marlow quickly throws the body of his helmsman overboard because, amongst the cannibals, a "second-rate helmsman" might become a "first-class temptation." This wavering may be a sign of inner strug­gle or simply indicate ongoing ambivalence.

The most impressive steps Marlow takes toward recognition, ones overlooked by Achebe, are when he turns the tables. He imag­ines that Englishmen would soon clear out the road between Deal and Gravesend if African colonizers started catching them to carry heavy loads. And he realizes that in Africa drums may have "as found a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country." where drums represent savagery, and Marlow!s excited re';pame tells him he's kin to Africans because he also contains primal but in this passage he sees they are kin to him because they have reverence.

Achebe dismisses Conrad's expressions of sympathy for su,ffeJring

HEART OF DARKNESS AND RACISM 373

AFricans as "bleeding heart sentiments" S . as I'liberalism" Marlow's react" th· II peclfically, he describes Marlow doesn't fully recognize l~~ ~ e .grove of dea~h." Perhaps ingAfricans, though his statemen~ J::::~:~;,,~nd equalIty ~,f the dy­rage at the waste of the Belgian . orror-struck and his h

s seem SIncere en h And aps one can fault Marlow for th·nl . f oug . per-

hand over a biscuit and to tell h' lung 0 nothing better to do than boat on the Thames 0 lIS story years later to four men on a

. ne can a so perh f I C ing more himself when h t d aps au t onrad for not do-

e re ume to Engla d f . . horrors of the Congo Arth C n a ter wltnessmg the

. ur onan Doyle and M k" . b became actively involved in th C R .c ar .twam oth e ongo elOrm As .. wrote books condemning Leo old A a . SOCIation and Casement, which Conrad anO\~ed t·o b~ : from hIS 1903 .letter to tributed, he declined to becom f th prolduced and WIdely dis-

e ur er mvoved C h ever, forgave him because he d' . asement, ow-fighting an almost incapacitatin~a~ ee~ I~ work o~ Nostromo and the C.R.A., Edmund Dene Mo espan. asement s co-founder of 1909 after the Congo h d breI, . also forgave Conrad and in

that Heart of Darkness, W~ich ;:~c~~~pped fr~~ Leopol~, declared Marlow's, was the IImost 0 f I h.a muc arger audIence than ject."4 p wer u t mg ever ""Titten on the sub-

RaCIsm in Conrad's time was end . .& p . was so assumed that the word dId :::c. S ~te~ Flrchow notes, it sensitIvity to raCIsm came fro h . yet eXI.st. Part of Conrad's the end of his life, he spoke E~ li:~ be~~ subject to it hImself To he was dIfficult to understand

g Alt:t ~u.ch a heavy accent that glophIle, Conrad's sense of extr~me f.u g

/n many ways an An­story IIAmy Foster" In which E ~ lena IOn IS suggested by his southern England after a sht:re~~ ~opean IS washed ashore in of his stran elan ua ~ . an presumed msane because lected him;s IIno~ ofg:~rEr~~~~h(2Vl2s)It?'lrskto Cponlrahd In Kent recol-

. , lea OIS jew"(40) "h conventIOnal stage Hebrew" (67) "s· " "( )" . ' t e isms" (104)" 0 . ' Imlan 96, onental manner

, very nental indeed" (109) " I I -'(113)" 0 ' spectacu ar y a for , an nental face" (lIS) (( M -

"like a monkey" (138) 6 Whil c' seml- ongolian" (126), .. . e onrad may ha d

racIst attItudes himself, he aCIdly attacked h' ve :xpr:sse

p~~~aps ~ost c1~arlY In his Malayan nove';: ~~::~~: Sl~O~: basis c~~ ~::~: s~{~nw:~tl:r~~n:~~i%~m :uperion~ solely in An Outcast of the Islands Wh g. xample IS Peter

. en WIllems falls in love

E~mund Dene Morel, HIS/OJ)' of the Con 0 R fr: ~n Je~ Stengers (London: OxforJ UP 1968e) mn Movement, ed. William Roger Louis et~~ Flrchow, Envisioning Africa. Racism a ,p. 2050.. .

"Qess (~exington. U of Kentucky P, 2000) n:: Imperlaltsm tn Conrad)s "Heart of Dark-Uotations taken from To> h C diP ..

(Iowa City' U of Iowa P, ·19§b). anra: Inte11lwws and Hecollecfions, ed. Martin Ray

374 HUNT HAWKINS

with Omar's daughter, Aissa, he feels he is "surrendering. to ,a .,:ild creature the unstained purity of his life, of his race, of hIs cI~hz~~ tion." Later, after the love is gone, Willems cannot stand A'issa s staring at him. He calls her eyes lithe eyes of a savage; of a damned

I half-Arab half-Malay. They hurt me! I am white! I swear mongre" . b' 1"7 to you I can't stand this! Take me away. I am w~~te! All W lte" . ~en Achebe revised ilAn Image of Mrica, he de-AnghcIzed

"bloody racist" to "thoroughgoing racist." We must ask, though, how thoroughgoing Conrad was. And we must distinguish de~ees and kinds of racism. Whatever may be said of Conrad, he certamly did not share the most extreme racism of his time. He did not ~sh the annihilation of all non-Europeans. But Achebe seems to thmk so. In his original version Achebe compared Conrad to. iiAlI th.ose men in Nazi Germany who lent their talent to the servIce of.~ru~ lent racism." Achebe removed this sentence in his 1988 reVIsIOn, but in his interview in 2000 when again denying the value of Con~ rad's work, he said, i'I've not encountered any good art that pro-motes genocide."g ..

The almost inevitable trajectory of Social DarWInISm was geno­cide. Darwin himself concluded in The Descent of Man: "At some future period not very distant as measured by centuries, the civi~ lized races of'man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world'· (156). Alfred Russel Wallace

d d h · s 1864 article by saving "the higher-the more mtellec­en e I )~ , d d JJ

tual and moral-must displace the lower and more degra e races (clxvix). Eduard von Hartmann in his 1869 Philosophy of the Un­conscious, a book Conrad read, wrote that it wasn't humane to pro~ long Hthe death struggles of savages who are on the verge of extinction .... The true philanthropist, if he has comprehended the natural law of anthropological evolution, cannot avoid desiring an acceleration of the last convulsion, and labor for that end."9 And in 1894 in Social Evolution Benjamin Kidd observed, (The Anglo­Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples with which he has come into competition."l

The man in Heart of Darkness who writes UExterminate all the brutes!" is of course Kurtz. He may only be referring to his la~e tribe, but pretty clearly he's referring, in the spirit of the ~ocl.al Darwinists to all Africans. His statement echoes that of Carh~r In

uAn Outpo~t of Progress," who voiced "the necessity of extermmat-

7. Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (Ncw York Doubleday; Page, 1924), pp 80,

271. h" 8. Quoted by Jaggi in "Storyteller of the Savanna.. . . 9. Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the UnconscfOus (1869, London.

1893),2.12. kG P P • S , 1. Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution (1894; rpt. New Yor: . . utnams on,

p.49.

HEART OF DARKNESS AND RACISM 375

ing all the nigg~rs before the country could be made habitable."2, Kurtz .scrawls h.Is statement at the bottom of his report for the In~ ternatIOnal S~clety for the Suppression of Savage Customs as if it were the logIcal outcome of that proTect the 'ieYTlosition of h d JJ I ' I J, "Lr a met ~. t s unc ear how much Conrad was warning against actual geno~l~e. He Was certainly familiar with the theories of the Social DarWll1lsts, but they had not yet been put deliberately in practice, although Europeans had already wiped out several native popula~ tions through disease and displacement. In the Congo somewhere between hvo and ten million Africans were killed during the twenty-th~ee ~ears of King Leopold's rule but not through a policy of extermmatlOn. They died through the brutality of forced labor reprisals, and privation. But in October 1904, when the Herer~ tribe in Southwest Africa resisted German colonization, General Adolf von Trotha gave orders for all eighty thousand of them to be killed. ~ver t~e next two years the Germans succeeded nearly com~ pletely 111 .doll1g so and a new word entered their vocabulary: Konzentratwnslager or concentration camp. In his 19 I 5 essay IiPoland Revisited," Conrad observed that the Germans were "with a consciousness of superiority freeing their hands from all moral bonds, anxious to take up, if I may express myself so the 'perfect

• b d '''3 H· d ' man s ur en. IS wor s now seem prescient, but they weren't really. The 'iperfect man's burden" was simply an extension of the liwhite man's burden," and the genocides of the twentieth century had already begun.

The las.ting polit~cal legacy of Heart of Darkness, more than any confirmatIOn o~ raCIsm, has been its alarm over atrocity. Its title has entered our leXIc.on as code for extreme human rights abuses, usu~ ally those commItted by whites in nonL Western countries but also those committed by non~whites and those committed in Europe.

for example the titles of just three recent books: Jacques In~o th~ Ifeart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid's Assas~

Tuntzs Confronting the Heart of Darkness: An Interna~ Symposium on Torture in Guatemala, and Ferida Durakovic's

of poems titled simply Heart of Darkness about the Serbian of Sarejevo and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Durakovic thanks

Conrad, who realized long before others that darkness had and the heart had darkness."4 Far from condoning geno­

Conrad clearly saw humanity's horrific capacity and gave it a

{~~f)h Conrad, "An Outpost of Progress" in Tales of Unresi (New Yorlc Doubleday, Page, ,p. lOS.

{~~f)h Conrad, "Poland Revisited" in Notes on Life and Letters (London: John Grant, ' p. 147.

Ferida DurakoviC, Heart of Darkness (Fredonia, NY: VVhite Pine Press, 199B), p. 109

336 CHINUA ACHEBE

. h empty water gourd and his the long grass near the path, VVlt an

long staff lying by his side." I d d s not make up an ordinary All h ' must acknow e ge, oe b 9

t IS, one 1" the letter of Novem er , light travelogue. T~ere is no li~~ e lIon~i~: after returning from the 1891, Conrad recelV~d ~ro~ ~ g~trd and seriously depressed: ((I Congo, and while P YSlca y 1 s~ ~ t mperament you ought to am sure tha: w~th you~ me :~~o 0 :ssi~istic conclusions. I advise avoid all medItatIOns w~lch ~ef h P and to cultivate cheerful you to lead a more actwe h e t an ev~r d lacking ''The

"2 U 'I guage on certam pages, an habits. ne~~n In an m '(Heart of Darkness" nevertheless re­Secret Sharer s econa dY' k dit tions in literature, and one of mains one of the great ar me a t the purest expressions of a melancholy temperamen .

CHINUA ACHEBE

An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darknesst

lki one day from the English De-In the fall of 1974 I was wa ng ki g lot. It was

h U ' 'ty of Massachusetts to a par n partment at t e mvers} h d friendliness to passing . suc as encourage a fine autumn mornmg h' in all directions, many of strangers .. Brisk youngster.s w~:~r fi~~:~h of enthusiasm. An older them o~vlOusly freshmen m I turned and remarked to me how very man gomg the same way as d Th n he asked me if I was a young they came these days, I agree

h, Whe t d'd I teach? African

I 'd 0 I was a teac er. a I II student too. Sal n, h' d because he knew a fe ow literature. Now that was funny, e ~al "t was Mrican history, in a who taught the same thing, or pefr afPs 1 here It always surprised

C 'ty College not ar rom· Af certain ommum h had thought of rica as him, he went on to say, becaus~ e n~v;r this time I was walking having that kind of stuff, you

d h' ow, l II behind me: "I guess

h f ter "Oh well" I hear 1m say na y, muc as. , fi d " I have to take your course to d n out. touching letters from high

A few weeks later I receive tw~ v~ry h -bless their teacher­school children in Yonkers, New or , w 0

h ad Lifo nd Letters (1927),1:148. k 2. G. Jean-Aubry, Josep hC~19'88' Ih'·'d

a Norton Critical Editlon of Heart ()f Df"'M""",hPP ..

Revised version for t e IT , e at the University 0 assa . t 251-62. Originally delivered as a Chancehllors Lbefth:d under the title "An Image of

h 18 Febmanr 1975 ten pu IS b" of the au, setts, Am erst, on. LJ. ' 1977)' 782-94 Used ypemussIOn Africa" in The Mas.~achu5eU.s Retn~, 1.~ ( t th 1977 v~rsion IS given in the noteS. Un~ thor.VVhenAchebc'srcvisionsareSlglll. cah " e .

less indicated, the other not~sdabe the .~u~eoh:d never thought of Africa as having that 1 "Now that was funny, he sal, ecaus

. lund of stuff, you know" [1977].

AN IMAGE OF AFRICA 337

had just read Things Fall Apart.2 One of them was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe,

I propose to draw from these rather trivial encounters rather heavy conclusions which at first sight might seem somewhat out of proportion to them. But only, I hope, at first sight.

The young fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on accollnt of his age but I believe also for much deeper and more serious reasons, is obviously unaware that the life of his uwn tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of odd cllstoms and superstitions and, like every­body else in his culture, imagines that he needs a trip to Africa to encounter those things.

The other person being fully my own age could not be excused on the grounds of his years. Ignorance might be a more likely rea­son; but here again I believe that something more willful than a mere lack of information was at work For did not that erudite British historian and Regius Professor at Oxford, Hugh Trevor Roper, also pronounce that African history did not exist?

If there is something in these utterances more than youthful in­experience, more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire-one might indeed say the need-in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.

This need is not new; which should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhaps make us even willing to look at this phe­nomenon dispassionately. I have neither the wish nor the compe­tence to embark on the exercise with the tools of the social and biological sciences but more simply in the manner of a novelist re­sponding to one famous book of European fiction: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which better than any other work that I know displays that Western desire and need which I have just referred to. Of course there are whole libraries of books devoted to the same purpose but most of them are so obvious and so crude that few people worry about them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is un­doubtedly one of the great stylists of modem fiction and a good story-teller into the bargain. His contribution therefore falls auto­

, matically into a different class-permanent literature--:-read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar

, has numbered it "among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language."3 I will return to this critical opinion in due

Achebe's great novel of Africa (1959). [Editor] Albert J. Guerard, Introduction to Heart of Darkness (New York: New American Library, 1950), p. 9.

338 CHINUA ACHEBE

course because it may seriously modify my earlier suppositions about who mayor may not be guilty in some of the matters I will now raise.

Heart of Darkness projects the image of Mrica as "the other world/' the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting peacefully "at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks." But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very an~ tithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that "Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world."

Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other had? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too ilhas been one of the dark places of the earth." It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging re­crudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.

These suggestive echoes comprise Conrad's famed evocation of the Mrican atmosphere in Heart of Darkness. In the final consider­ation his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on pages 34 and 35 of the present edition: a) It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention and b) The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incompre­hensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjective nom time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc., etc.

The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention long ago to Conrad's iladjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incompre­hensible mystery." That insistence must not be dismissed lighdy, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of artistic good faith. When a \iVrlter while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bom­bardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such underhand activity. But Conrad chose his subject well-one which was guaranteed not to put him in

AN IMAGE OF AFRICA 339

conflict with the s hI' I ' h

P yc 0 oglca pre-disposition f h· d t e need for him to contend ·th th. . 0 IS rea ers or raise f

WI elr reSlS tance H h h o purveyor ~f comforting myths. . e c ose t e role

The most mteresting and reveal· are, however about people I 109 passages in Heart of Darkness reader to qu~te almost a who I must fcrave the indulgence of my

hoe page rom about th 'ddl f

story w en representatives of E . - e fil e 0 the Congo encounter the denizens o~rz~:~ a steamer going down the

We were wanderers on a reh· . wore the aspect of an unknPownlS\~~C earth, on an earth that ourselves the first of men takin p et. ':Ve could have fancied heritance to be subdued t th g posseSSIOn of an accursed in-

f' a e cost of profou d . h

o excessive toil. But suddenl n angms and there would be a glimpse of ru\as ~t struggled round a bend burst of yells, a whirl of black ;im~: s, of peaked grass-roofs, a of feet stamping, of bodies sw . ' a mass of h~nds clapping, droop of heavy and mot' I aytnfg'l. o eyes roIlIng under the I IOn ess 0 lage The st ·1 d

a ong slowly on the edge of a black· . earner to~ e frenzy. The prehistoric man wa . and mcomprehensible

. s curslOg us pravin t I commg us-who could tell? V\li 'l~ g 0 us, we -hension of our surround. e were. cut off from the compre­wondering and secretly a;;:l;~;e glIded past like phantoms, an enthusiastic outbreak in a rn~;~ sane men would be before stand because we were too f douse. We could not under­cause we were travellin in th ar ~n could not remember, be­that are gone leaving h~rdl e ~lght of first ages, of those ages

The earth 'seemed unea:t~l sIgn-and no memories. upon the shackled £; f y. We are accustomed to look there you could looko~a ~hi: conquered monster, but there-earthly and th g monstrous and free. It was un-

e men were No th Well, you know that was th' . . . . ey ~ere not inhuman. not being inhuman. It wou~ :~:.t o~ltlthls suspicion of their and leaped and spun and d he s .ow y to one, They howled you was just the thought mfa the . orr hId fac~s, but what thrilled th h

0 elf umamty-like h oug t of your remote kinshi with th.. your~-t e

uproar. Ugly. Yes it was I PhIS mId and paSSIOnate enough you would admit tug y eno~g , but if you were man

th~ faintest trace of a resp~:S~~~~het~at ~~er~ waks in you just nOIse, a dim suspicion of th b. errl e ran ness of that

ere elOg a meaning in . t h· h you-you so remote from the ni h f fi I W IC prehend. g t 0 rst ages-could corn-

Herein lies the meaning of He f D k holds over the Western min;.rt((~ ar nes.s and the fascination it thought of their humanit I'k' at thnlled you was just the

H ' y-l e yours, , , , Ugly." avmg shown us Mrica in the mass, Conrad then zeros in, half a

340 CHINUA ACHEBE

page later, on a specific example, giving us one of his rare descrip­tions of an Mrican who is not just limbs or rolling eyes:

And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a ver­tical boiler. He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity-and he had filed his teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank) instead of which he was hard at work) a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.

As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side, He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad things4 being in their place is of the utmost importance.

hEne fellows-cannibals-in their place/' he tells us pointedly. Tragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place, like Eu­rope leaving its safe stronghold between the policeman and the baker to take a peep into the heart of darkness.

Before the story takes us into the Congo basin proper we are given this nice little vignette as an example of things in their place:

Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted) sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks-these chaps; but they had bone, muscle) a wild vitality) an intense energy of movement that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at.

Towards the end of the story Conrad lavishes a whole page5 quite unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr. Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permit­ted a little liberty)6 like a formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure:

4. "(and persons)" [1977]. The next two paragraphs (£rom "Fine fellows" to "a great com­fort to look at") were added in 1988.

5. "great attention" [1977]. 6. "a little imitation of Conrad" [1977].

AN IMAGE OF AFRICA 341

She was savage and s b 'ld She stood looking at u~P~tho: -e~ed and. magnificent. ... itself, with an air of bro d' a Stl~ and like the wilderness , 0 mg over an Inscrutable purpose.

TIns Amazon is dr . . d dictable nature for ~wno reI an cons pI , erablhe detail) albeit of a pre-

, sons. lrst s e is' hId can win Conrad's special brand f ' I m er p ace an so a structural requirement of th 0 t ap~rova and second) she fulfills

fi d E e s ory. a savage counterp rt t h

re ne, uropean woman who 'II t f h a 0 t e VVl s ep ort to end the story:

She came forward all in black with a I . me in the dusk Sh . , pa e head, floatmg toward

. e was In mourmng She t k b h hands in hers and murmured III h d h' . 'd' 00 ot my

Sh h d 1 a ear you were com' " i~~. e a a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for su~~~-

The difference in the attitude of the Ii h is conveyed in too many direct and b~ove st to t ese two women But perhaps the most significa t d,uff e way~ to need elaboration.

h' n I erence IS the one' l' d .

t e author s bestowal of hum' Imp Ie In holding of it hom the other aIn

t ~xprlessllOn to the one and the with-

. IS C ear y not part of C d' pose to confer language on th " d' onra s pur-e ru lmentary I" f Afr' place of speech they made "a violent babbl /ou s °h lca. In They I<exchanged short runti " eo uncout sounds."7

But most of the time the; wer;~o~t::e~~~~~e~mong_ themselves. two occasions in the book h Y

h C Ir frenzy. There are

) owever w en onrad d what from his practice and conf ' h eparts some-h

ers speec ,even English s h t e savages. The first occurs whe 'b I' peec ,on them: n canm a Ism gets the better of

(Ie t h" "h an~ ~ fl~~ ot sSh::~:e~th '~:tl~~~~hot ;de~ing of his eyes

YOU eh)" I k d " h 1m. Ive 1m to us," uTo

h "d' as e j w at would you do with them)" liE- t!' II!

e sm curtly.... . a 1m.

The other occasion was the famous announcement:

"Mistah Kurtz-he dead."

At first sight these instances mIght be mIstaken" d of gene 't f C wr unexpecte raSl y rom onrad. In reality th .

best assaults I th f ey constitute some of that had ~h n f e case ~ the cannibals the incomprehensible

adequate f us , ar serve them for speech suddenly proved in­nnsp<,ak:ab1°e

r Con:ad s. purpose of letting the European glimpse the

:- cravmg In their hearts ,{Xl' h' h torlsis,tellcy , h . vvelg mg t e neceSSIty for

ad ~n t e 10rtrayal of the dumb brutes against the sensa van ages 0 securing their conviction by clear) unambigu~

. Sentence added in 1988.

, I

I ,

'I ',I ,! ., 'I , :1

342 CHlNUAAcHEBE

OilS evidence issuing out of their own mouth Conrad chose the latter. As for the announcement of Mr. Kurtz's death by the iiinso­lent black head in the doorway" what better or more appropriate fi­nis could be written to the horror story of that wayvvard child of civilization who willfully had given his soul to the powers of dark­ness and "taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land" than the proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had joined?

It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad's but that of his fictional narra­tor, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the mor~l universe of his history. He has, for example, a narra­tor behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow but his ac­count is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person. But if Conrad's intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire8 between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint how­ever subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad's power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary. Marlow seems to me to enjoy Con­rad's complete confidence-a feeling reinforced by the close simi­larities between their two careers.

Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of truth, but one holding. those advanced and humane views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by atrocities in Bulgaria or the Congo of King Leopold of the Belgians or wherever.

Thus Marlow is able to toss out such bleeding-heart sentiments as these:

They were dying slowly-it was very clear. They were not en­emies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying con­fusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in unconge­nial surtoundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, be­came inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.

The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad touched all the best minds of the age in England, Europe and America. It took different forms in the minds of different people but almost al­ways managed to sidestep the ultimate question of equality be-

8. Quarantine barrier (French). [Editor]

----------------.... AN IMAGE OF AFRICA 343

tween white peo~le and black people. That extraordina mission­a;;, ~ber~ S~hweltzer, who sacrificed brilliant careers in ;:lUSic and t eo ogy m urope for a life of service to Mricans in much th same areta ashCohnrhad writes about, epitomizes the ambivalence In: coromen w IC as often been t d S h . Afr' .. d d quo e c weitzer says' "The

Ican IS III ee my brother but my junior brother)) And it ceedc~ ~o blli~d ad hospital ~ppropriate to the needs' of jun~~r ~r~~~~ e~s;t ~t~n ar hS of hygIene reminiscent of medical practice in t l~ ~s be ore t e germ theory of disease came into being. Natu­ra y e ecame a sensation in Europe and America P'I . flocked, and I believe still flock even after h h d' I gnms

ess the d·' e as passe on, to wit~ n . pro IglOUS miracle in Lamberence on the ed f h pnmeval forest. ,ge ate

Conrad's liberalism would not tak h' . f S h . j helm qUIte as ar as c weltzer s, tough. He would not use the word brother how

qu~lified; the farthest he would go was kinship, When Marl~:;: AfrICan helmsman falls down with a spea . h' h h . h' r III IS eart e gIVes his w Ite master one final disquieting look.

And thde ih;ntimate profundity of that look he gave me when he receIve s hurt remains to this d . . claim of distant kinship affirmed in aa

y III my memory-hke a

supreme moment,

It is important to note that Conrad ful . d . ,care as ever wIth his war s, IS co~cerned not so much about distant kinshi as ab someone lay. mg a claim on it The blacl I IP, out h' " . (man ays a c 31m on the ~ Ite n;,a\ tIC: IS well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this calm w IC, Ig tens and at the same time fascinates Conrad ({ the thought of their humanity-like yours U I " ' '" Th . f .... gy.

e pomt a my observations should be quite clear b namely that Joseph C d h Y now, . . oura was a t oroughgoing9 racist. That this

~lmpI~ truth. IS glo.ssed over in criticisms of his work is due to the . act t at ,whIte r~clsm against Africa is such a normal way of think­, ~;a~a~ ~ ~amfest.~ltiO~S go completely unremarked. Students of so mu

0 h a:thn~~ 0 te~ tell you that Conrad is concerned not

. c WI lca as WIth the deterioration of one Euro ean nnnd caused by solitude and sickness They '11 . t p th ted' . ,WI pom out to you

a ~nra IS,. If anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the . an he I,S t~ .t?~ natives, that the point of the story is to

Eu~ope s Cl\'IhZIllg mission in Africa,) A Conrad student iu~ "e!:ration

me III Sco~land that Africa is merely a setting for the disin-

,- of the mmd of Mr. Kurtz.

teliminaltesiS partly.the point, Mrica as setting and backdrop which the Afncan as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical

"bloody" [1977]. The last clause (beginnmg ('that the pO'nt of . ") , .. was added In 198B.

344 CHINUAAcHEBE

battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wan­dering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposter­ous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Mrica to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Mrica and Mricans which this age-long attitude has fostered and contin­ues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a por­tion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My an­swer is: No, it cannot. 2 I do not doubt Conrad's great talents. Even Heart of Darkness has its memorably good passages and moments:

The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the for­est had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return.

Its exploration of the minds of the European characters is often penetrating and full of insight. But all that has been more than fully discussed in the last fifty years. His obvious racism has, how­ever, not been addressed. And it is high time it was!

Conrad was born in 1857, the very year in which the first Angli­can missionaries were arriving among my own people in Nigeria. It was certainly not his fault that he lived his life at a time when the reputation of the black man was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility there remains still in Conrad's attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter vvith a black man is very revealing:

A certain enormous bu'(:k nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards. 3

2. The rest of this paragraph was added m 1988, replacing the original version: "I would not call that man an artist, for example, who composes an eloquent instigation to one people to fall upon another and destroy them. No matter how striking his imagery or how beautiful hIS cadences fall such a man is no more a great artist than another may be called a pnest who reads the mass backwards or a physician who poisons his patients. All those men in Nazi Germany who lent their talent to the service of virulent racism whether in science, philosophy or the arts have generally and rightly been condemned for their perversions. The hme is long overdue for taking a hard look at the work of cre­ative artists who apply their talents, alas often considerable as in the case of Conrad, to set people against people. This, I take it, is what Yevtushenko is after when he tells us that a poet cannot be a slave trader at the same time, and gives the striking example of Arthur Rimbaud who was fortunately honest enough to give up any pretenses to poetry when he opted for slave trading. For poetry surely can only be on the side of man's de­liverance and not his enslavement, for the brotherhood and unity of all mankind and against the doctrines of Hitler's master races or Conrad's 'rudimentary souls.' "

3 Jonah Raslan, The Mythology of Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 143

AN IMAGE OF AFRICA 345

Certainly Conra~ had a problem "With niggers. His inordinate love of that word Itself should be of interest to ps h I S ' h' fi ' yc oana ysts,

om.etlmes I~ x~tlOn on blackness is equally interesting as when he gIVes us thIS bnef description:

Abl bllack figure stood up, strode on long black legs waving long ac (arms. . . . '

as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to wave whIte arms! But so unrelenting I'S Conrad' b ' As f . s 0 seSSIOn.

a matter 0 mterest Conrad gives us in A Personal Record what amount~ to a companion piece to the buck nigger of Haiti. At the age of SIXteen Conrad encountered his first Englishma . E H II h' 'i f b n m urope.

e ca s .1m my un orgetta Ie Englishman" and describes him in the followmg manner:

"(his) calves exposed to the public gaze, , , dazzled the be­~older by the splendor of their marble-like condition and their DC? ton~ of y?ung ivory. ... The light of a headlong, exalted sahsfactlOn WIth the world of men 'II' d h' f d . . .. 1 umme IS ace ... a.n . triumphan~ eyes. In passing he cast a glance of kindly cu­nO~lty and a fr~endly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth ... his whIte calves twmkled sturdily."4

Irrational love and irrational hate J'ostling t th ' h h h I

oge ermt e eartof t at ta ented, tormented man But whereas irratio all

d f I·' nove may at

worst engen er 00 Ish acts of indiscretion l'rratl'on I h t d h

· , a a e can en-anger t e hfe of the communih , Naturally Cd' d "

h " . ~J' onra IS a ream lor

psyc oanalytIc cntlCS. Perhaps the most detailed st d f h' , th ' d' , 'b u Y 0 1m m

IS lrectlOn IS y Bernard C, Meyer M D I h' I h b k M fll

, .. nlsengtyooDr. eyer 0 ows every conceivable lead (and sometimes inconceiv­

ab~e. ~nes) to explain Conrad. As an example he gives us long dis­qUISitIOns on the significance of hair and hair-cutting in Conrad. t d yet not even one word is spared for his attitude to black peo­p e. Not even. the discussion of Conrad's antisemitism was enou h to spark off l~ Dr. Meyer's mind those other dark and explosi~e thoughts. \Vhlch only leads one to surmise that Western psychoan­alysts must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad as ab­solutely norm~l despite the profoundly important work done b Frantz Fanon m the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria y

Whatever Conrad's problems were, you might say he' is now ~afel~ldead" Quite true, Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues

s ~~l • WhIch ~s why an offensive and5 deplorable book can be de­sen ed by a senous scholar as "among the half dozen greatest short

4. Bernard C. Meyer M D Jose h C d A ~on UP, 1967), p. 30.'" p onra: Psyclwanalytic Biography (Pnnceton; Pnnce-5. totally" [1977].

a

"

i ,I

346 CHINUA ACHEBE

novels in the English language." And why it is today per~aps the most commonly prescribed novel in t~entieth~cen~~ry !Iterature courses in English Departments of Amencan UnIVersItIes. .

There are two probable grounds on which what I have saId. so far may be contested. The first is that it is no. concern of fi:tion to please people about whom it is ~itten. I wIll go alon? wIth that. But I am not talking about pleasmg people. I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and ~n­suIts from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agomes and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very hu­manity of black people is called in question. 7

Secondly, I may be challenged on the grounds of actuality. Con­rad, after all, did sail down the Congo in 1890 when my own father was still a babe in arms. How could I stand up more than ~fty years after his death and purport to contradict him? My answer IS that as a sensible man I will not accept just any traveller's tales solely on the grounds that I have not made the journey myself. I will not trust the evidence even of a man's very eyes when I suspect them to be as jaundiced as Conrad's. And we also happen to know th,~t Co~­rad was in the words of his biographer, Bernard C. Meyer, noton-

, fh' h' "8 ously -inaccurate in the rendering 0 IS o~n ISt~ry. But more important by far is the abundant testlmo~y a?out Con­

rad's savages which we could gather if we were so mclmed from other sources and which might lead us to think that these people must have had other occupations besides merging into the evil fo~­est or materializing out of it simply to plague Marlow an~ hIs dispirited band. For as it happened, soon after Conrad had wntten his book an event of far greater consequence was taking place in the art world of Europe. This is how Frank Willett, a British art his­torian, describes it:

Gaugin had gone to Tahiti, the most e~travagant indivi~ual a~t of turning to a non-European culture m the dec~des Imme~I­ately before and after 1900, wh~n European artIsts were aVId for new artistic experiences, but It was only about 1904--:5 th~t African art began to make its distinctive impact. One plec~ 15

still identifiable' it is a mask that had been given to Maunce Vlaminckin 1905. He records that Derain was 'speechless' and 'stunned' when he saw it, bought it from Vlaminck and in turn showed it to Picasso and _Matisse, who were also greatly af-

6. The 1977 version reprinting the Chancellor's Lecture, limited its reference to "iliUI ~wn English Departm~nt here" and ended the pamgraph with this sentence. "Indeed e tIme is long overdue for a hard look at tMngs." 'bl 'de

7. "It seems to me totally inconceivable that great art or even good art could pOSSI y reSl in such unwholesome surroundings" [1977J.

8. Meyer, p. 30.

AN IMAGE OF AFRICA 347

fected by it. Ambroise Vollard then borrowed it and had it cast in bronze .... The revolution of twentieth century art was un­der way!9

The mask in question was made by other savages living just north of Conrad's River Congo. They have a name too: the Fang people, and are without a doubt among the world's greatest masters of the sculptured form. The event Frank Willett is referring to marked the beginning of cubism and the infusion of new life into European art, which had run completely out of strength.

The point of all this is to suggest that Conrad's picture of the peoples of the Congo seems grossly inadequate even at the height of their subjection to the ravages of King Leopold's Interriational Association for the Civilization of Central Africa.

Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about them­selves. But even those not blinkered, like Conrad with xenophobia, can be astonishing blind. Let me digress a little here. One of the greatest and most intrepid travellers of all time, Marco Polo, jour­neyed to the Far East from the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and spent twenty years in the court of Kublai Khan in China. On his return to Venice he set down in his book entitled De­scription of the World his impressions of the peoples and places and customs he had seen. But there were at least two extraordinary omissions in his account. He said nothing about the art of printing, unknmV11 as yet in Europe but in full flower in China. He either did not notice it at all or if he did, failed to see what use Europe could possibly have for it. ~atever the reason, Europe had to wait an­other hundred years for Gutenberg. But even more spectacular was Marco Polo's omission of any reference to the Great Wall of China nearly 4,000 miles long and already more than 1,000 years old at the time of his visit. Again, he may not have seen it; but the Great Wall of China is the only structure built by man which is visible from the moonP Indeed travellers can be blind.

As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Mrica which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance pe­riodically at Mrica trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with

9. Frank Willet, African Art (New York Praeger, 1971), pp. 35-36, 1. For the omission of the Great Wall of China, I am indebted to The Journey of Marco Pow

as recreated by artist Michael Foreman, published by Pegasus Magaztne, 1974.

H

II I

.1 II':

I I

,.,,1 I, I I

'i,' ,I

1'" : ,III I

,:',,'

IIII

348 CHINUA ACHEBE

faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God" Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Graf-a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is some­thing to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness should have heeded that warn­ing and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irre­sistible allure of the jungle and lo! the darkness found him out.

In my original conception of this essay I had thought to conclude it nicely on an appropriately positive note in which I would suggest from my privileged-position in African and Western cultures some advantages the West might derive from Africa once it rid its mind of old prejudices and began to look at Africa not through a haze of dis­tortions and cheap mystifications but quite simply as a continent of people-not angels, but not rudimentary souls either~just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society. But as I thought more about the stereotype image, about its grip and pervasiveness, about the willful tenacity with which the West holds it to its heart; when I thought of the West's television and cinema and newspapers, about books read in its schools and out of school, of churches preaching to empty pews about the need to send help to the heathen in Africa, I realized that no easy optimism was possible. And there was, in any case, something totally wrong in offering bribes to the West in re­turn for its good opinion of Africa. Ultimately the abandonment of unwholesome thoughts must be its own and only reward. Although I have used the word willful a few times here to characterize the West's view of Africa, it may well be that what is happening at this stage is more akin to reflex action than calculated malice. W'hich does not make the situation more but less hopeful.

The Christian Science Monitor, a paper more enlightened than most, once carried an interesting article written by its Education Editor on the serious psychological and learning problems faced by little children who speak one language at home and then go to school where something else is spoken. It was a wide-ranging arti­cle taking in Spanish-speaking children in America, the children of migrant Italian workers in Germany, the quadrilingual phenome­non in Malaysia, and so on. And all this while the article speaks un­equivocally about language. But then out of the blue sky comes this:

2. The morally degenerate protagonist in Oscar Wilde's story (1891), who remains youthful and beautiful as his portrait turns old and ugly, reflecting the consequences of his licen­tiolls behavior. [Editor]

[IMPRESSIONISM AND SYMBOLISM IN HEART OF DARKNESS] 349

In L~ndo~ there is an enormous immigration of children who spea IndIan or Nigerian dialects, or some other native lan­guage.

I belie~e that the introduction of dialects which is technicallyer-roneous m the context is almost a reflex actio db"

" " d" f h n cause y an m-stinctlVe eSIre ate writer to downgrade th d" " h I f Af '. e ISCUSSlOn to t e le:-e a . nca and IndIa. And this is quite comparable to Conrad's WIthholdmg of language from his rudimentary souls. Language is too grand ~or these chaps; let's give them dialects!

In all thIS business a lot of violence is l"neVl"t bl d I , f . a y one not on y to the ~mage 0 de~plsed peoples but even to words, the very tools of pOSSIble redress. Look at the phrase native la "th S " . nguage III e ctence Mon~tor excerpt. Sur~ly the only native language possible in Lon­don IS ~od:ney E~ghsh. But our writer means something else~ somethmg appropnate to the sounds Indians and Africans make!4

Although the. work of redreSSing which needs to be done mayap­pear too dauntmg, I believe it is not one day too soon to begin. Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely u~a,:are of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth. But the VIctIms of racist slander who C t" h h d

I". lor cen unes ave a

to lye WIth the mhumanity it makes them h" t h I b elr a ave a ways known etter than any casual visitor even when hId d with the gifts of a Conrad. e comes oa e

IAN WAIT

[Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darknesslt

In .the tradition of what we are still calling modem literature, the claSSIC status of Heart of Darkness probably depends less on the

3. "In all this busmess a lot of . I '" bl d [1977]. " VlO enee IS meVlta y one to words and their meaning"

4, "something Indians and Afn k" 119771 Th with the followin t "nhs spea . e original versIOn then concludes

" g wo paragrup s: Perhaps a change will come P h th" h .

~~~h o~ti~is.m engendered by the ber:a~h~ki~g l:C~i:v~r::n~sh~f\~e~~en:~~~~c:ha~d ~e em ~a~ ~:;t;;~~ ~~ t:{~:r~~u:l;~~~hfllsihn. There is jU

f" hthe possibility that West:

papers the other da a . e ac levements 0 ot er people. I read in the bring back the exte%dedf:~Iti~1h;t wh~t Ameri~a ?eeds at this time is somehow to Volunteers coming to help y y. t iliw

In my mmd s eye future African Peace Corps "Seriousl althou h th ou se ~p e system.

heve that itY;s not o!e da e work whIch ne~ds to be done may appear too daunting, I be-From Ian W tt C d y too soon to begm. And where better than at a University?" pp, 168, 16;-75, 0;;:_7

1;' tlh;3~~~et~e:s~8~e~~u8ry (Berkeley:.U of California P, 1979),

Reprinted 'th th '. ' ,-200. Copynght © 1979 by Ian Watt rad in the Mnetee e theCIIll~slOn of t~e University of California Press. Extract from Con~ of the publIsher. ;;nlesse~dt?~tPUdbllshted by Chhatt°

th& ~Indus. Reprinted by permission

e ,noesaret eau ors.

, .1

,;,.1

'.,'1 , ,I

I

'II. 'I ,I. I 1 'II:'

, ·1 :.1'

,I '.',1 , 'I j,ll ',I , I

,I il'l ,I,ll'

Q

i '